I’ve been a part of every release of SharePoint technology since the start. Way back in the SPS 2001 (“Tahoe”) days, I was with Microsoft Consulting Services helping with field customers in the Tahoe early adopter program, and was part of the team that created architectural guidance for an optimal intranet deployment of SharePoint Portal Server 2001 and SharePoint Team Services 1.0.

I joined the SharePoint Product Management team officially in 2002, and became responsible for technical evangelism to developers and IT Pros. Over the five years that followed, I focused in on developer evangelism, interoperability issues, technical education, and a lot more. My final year at Microsoft was spend acting as a technical resource on Microsoft and competing technology to their enterprise sales teams.

I actually met the Nintex guys back in early 2002; the co-founders were still primarily in the services business, and they were attending a conference at which I was providing training. We became friends and colleagues and kept in touch. When Nintex decided to set up an American office earlier this year, they approached me and offered me more fun, more focus, and more money, and I’d still get to remain a part of the SharePoint community.

What is your role now?

I’m the Vice President of Product Technology, which essentially means I have a hand in everything from evangelism to marketing to sales to business planning to guiding short-term and long-term development and support tactics and strategies.

Tell us a bit about Nintex.

When I first met them, they were extremely clever and passionate SharePoint people, but there are several of those. Here’s the part that really impressed me…

While WSS 2.0 and SPS 2003 were great as a whole, we got a lot of grief (deservedly so) for not having a recycle bin and for not creating a new approval routing system for the then-new SQL Server store. I had, on several public occasions, told audiences how to use the eventing mechanism and a hidden document library to take care of the undelete problem, and that the eventing mechanism left room for clever workflow vendors to write something of their own. Weirdly enough, Nintex went out and built SmartLibrary, a product that did exactly those things (and a few others). Either they listened to me or we were simply in sync — either of those is a good thing.

Since then, they’ve set themselves up to build solutions FOR SharePoint technology and build them ON SharePoint technology. They’ve got short release cycles so they can adapt to new customer needs quickly, and they’re fully prepared to have to adapt/innovate/capitalize on changes that take place when Microsoft releases new versions.

Case in point: WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007 provide a recycle bin and an audit trail, so Nintex decided to throw their resources into taking SmartLibrary’s simple approval up several notches to create Nintex Workflow 2007. It’s built on the same declarative workflow platform used by SharePoint Designer, but they provide a visual design environment and expose a great deal more of the feature set offered by the Windows Workflow Foundation. Plus the upgrade path is nice. They’ve thought this through.

So what is Nintex Reporting? Start with a single-sentence description, if you don’t mind.

Nintex Reporting gives you insight into the structure, content, usage, and performance of your SharePoint assets.

If I can now elaborate with more than a sentence, I’ll add that you can use it for adoption planning, usage monitoring, capacity planning, and a lot more.

There are over 75 reports in the box that cover user activity, list creation and usage, document popularity with breakdowns by file type and content type, site size, site collection size, content database saturation, and a lot more. Reports are executed on a schedule and archived. You can drill down to the individual details with one click.

Who would use it?

If you’re in charge of any corner of your SharePoint deployment, there’s something in it for you. It’s certainly optimized for IT pros operating SharePoint farms, but it’s actually quite useful to an individual site manager. The entire UI is built out of Web Parts and delivered by default as a custom site definition, but you can place key Web Parts that point to reports, scope them to a single site or collection, and embed them in any site. Would you like to see how much activity is taking place in different discussion lists? Who’s downloading which documents? How often they get updates vs. read? You can have that.

How is it different from the out-of-the-box capabilities present in SharePoint Server?

I’ll give you four good ones:

1) First off, it tells you a lot more than you’ll get in the box with MOSS or WSS.

2) Second, it’s very easy to use. You get interactive, Silverlight-based reports with drill-down, pop-over data visualization, and a lot more. You get role-based, easily customized dashboards that pull together sets of reports to suit specific user’s needs.

3) Third, the architecture is really, really nice. It takes a data warehouse-based approach. To keep the impact on your production environment low, we collect data out of your production servers and push facts into the warehouse. We execute reports against the warehouse on a schedule and cache the results. To boost response time, our UI reports from those cached results, and we only directly query the warehouse fact data when you need to do a drill-down. As a result, you get fast, fast access to, well, everything.

4) It’s extensible — very extensible. You can create your own data collectors, your own reports, your own dashboards, etc. You can even create SQL Server Analysis Services cubes against our warehouse and go nuts with your own queries using Excel Services, etc. Our SDK covers all of this.

That warehouse is what I regard as our secret sauce. We’ve released a product that provides SharePoint insight for everyone, but it’s just the first of many ways we can leverage that investment. Stay tuned!

Would you mind sharing a few screenshots?

Sure:

The collection of role-based dashboards available out of the box.

The role-based dashboard for a SharePoint implementation manager, consisting of KPI statistics, a set of graphical reports, and a set of subscription options. Embedded reports include unique users, popular sites, site activity, and document growth.

The role-based dashboard for an IT manager, consisting of KPI statistics, a set of graphical reports, and a set of subscription options. Embedded reports include file type distribution, document storage growth, content database growth, and team site sizes.

The role-based dashboard for a records manager, consisting of KPI statistics, a set of graphical reports, and a set of subscription options. Embedded reports include document type distribution, document growth, active authors, and document publication status.

The role-based dashboard for a system administrator, consisting of KPI statistics, a set of graphical reports, and a set of subscription options. Embedded reports include the most active users, document storage volume, and site creation statistics.

Report on total user activity, showing both graphical and tabular data, as well as subscription and configuration options.

Report on monthly growth of documents, showing both graphical and tabular data, as well as subscription and configuration options.

Report on list creators, showing both graphical and tabular data, as well as subscription and configuration options.

Report on the most active users of SharePoint Search, showing both graphical and tabular data, as well as subscription and configuration options.

Report on document content size per team site, showing both graphical and tabular data, as well as subscription and configuration options.

Report on farm-wide distribution of documents by file type, showing both graphical and tabular data, as well as subscription and configuration options.

Report on which users are creating the most content, showing both graphical and tabular data, as well as subscription and configuration options.

Report on monthly contributors to SharePoint sites across a farm, showing both graphical and tabular data, as well as subscription and configuration options.

Report on the most active users of a SharePoint farm, showing both graphical and tabular data, as well as subscription and configuration options.

Configuration screen for subscribing to snapshots of a report at predetermined times.